1. Field
The following description relates to an apparatus and a method for transmitting and receiving a spike event between neurons in a neuromorphic chip.
2. Description of Related Art
In a brain, tens of billions of nerve cells, that is, neurons, are interconnected through a complex nerve network. Each neuron develops intellectual abilities such as learning and memory by an exchange of signals, via synapses, with thousands of other neurons. A neuron is a structural and functional unit of a nervous system, and also a basic unit of data transmission. A synapse refers to a connection point between neurons, more particularly, to a connection point between an axon of one neuron and a dendrite of another neuron. Thus, one neuron is connected with thousands of other neurons through the synapses. By manufacturing an artificial nervous system that copies a biological nervous system in units of a neuron, a data processing system simulating a brain may be achieved. A neuromorphic chip is a semiconductor circuit that implements such a data processing system.
The neuromorphic chip is effective when implementing an intelligent system capable of autonomously adapting to an unspecified environment. Such a technology may be applied to computers, robots, home appliances, small mobile devices, security and monitoring, intelligent car security, autonomous driving, and the like that perform recognition and estimation such as voice recognition, danger recognition, and real-time fast signal processing.
In the neuromorphic chip, a communication channel for transmission of event information is used to read a spike event generated by a neuron or transmit the spike event to another neuron. Conventionally, address event representation (AER) has been used, which asynchronously writes, to a communication bus, an address of a neuron in which an event occurs, at the time the spike event occurs. However, the AER method complicates a structure of a transceiver for reading and writing of the address.